The Faerie Queene (1590)

Sometime early in 1590, John Wolfe’s London print shop started a job for the stationer William Ponsonby, turning out sheets that would later be folded twice and bound into quarto-sized volumes of more than six hundred pages. Proof was read while the presses worked, with corrections made on the fly. Sheets already printed off were used at random (waste not, want not), with the result that “existing copies exhibit an entirely haphazard combination of revised and unrevised readings, and it is quite possible that there are no two copies whose readings agree throughout” (Johnson 1933, 13). This is not unusual; on the contrary, it is the way early modem books were typically made.